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How To Organize The Mac’s Messy Menubar

I found out about a Mac app that can keep track of your personal to-do list from the macOS Mojave Menubar. I love the Mac’s Menubar and use it far more than the average bear for its always available, one-click convenience.

The app I read about is called Thought Train. It’s like Stickies as notes stuck in one easy-to-grab location. I use Stickies on the Mac and wish there was an iPhone and iPad version with sync. Thought Train is decent and I’ll write about it somewhere in the future. My main focus today is where the app lives. The Mac’s usually overcrowded Menubar.

Bar Tending

If you are a Mac user who never ventures into the Menubar except for time, Notifications and Widgets, or to check on a wayward Wi-Fi connection, more power to you. Except you’re missing plenty of convenience and power because that Menubar can pack a punch.

The folks at Mac360 have reviewed dozens of utilities which grace the Menubar– from calendars to notes to file navigation to weather to clocks and alarms. The Menubar is just too convenient not to use. So, what’s all this noise about a messy Mac Menubar?

After you add a dozen or so add-on utilities to the Menubar– Dropbox, clipboard managers, network monitors, and the like– that Menubar’s limited space gets crowded. Organization is easy, though. Just press The Command-key and click to move the Menubar item where you want. Too many such utilities also means they may get cut off, or truncated, by a Mac app with an even longer list of menus.

Enter Bartender. It’s the Mac Menubar app that manages the Menubar apps. This is my favorite Mac Menubar app and I never use it. Once it’s set up, all the Menubar apps stay where they’re supposed to, and some even get hidden away but become visible with a click when you want them.

The examples above display how easy it is to organize the Menubar apps you want visible, and hide the rest– though they become visible with a click to the Bartender icon in the Menubar.

Use Bartender to setup multiple Menubars, each of which can be selected with a click. It comes with keyboard shortcuts for Mac power users. Navigate through the Menubar items with keyboard hotkey combos and the keyboard arrow key. If you’re at all like me and have far too many Menubar utilities, they can be searched just like using Spotlight.

If you want, you can hide the whole thing. Or, have Bartender display apps that have been updated recently. There just isn’t anything to not like about Bartender so it’s worth a try if you find your Mac’s Menubar to be too cluttered and unwieldy.

Try before you buy? Yep. Affordable? Yep. Easy to setup and use? Yep. Is this something Apple should put into macOS? Yep.

5G? Meh!

About Natalia Nowak

My husband, Nathan, and I have used Macs for nearly 25 years. We're teachers at a private school in Chicago, IL. I'm also the school's resident Mac system administrator, PC troubleshooter, and a diehard Mac diva and iPhone hacker. Read more of my articles here.